The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has approved a new generation of cameras that are linked wirelessly and operate in clusters, meaning that speeding drivers will be caught whichever route they take across a wide area … they read numberplates automatically and transmit data instantly to a penalty-processing centre … They are harder to vandalise than Gatso cameras because they are suspended from arms on six-metre poles.

The van was seemingly abandoned by police – no officers were inside as protesters started to vandalise it, and police looked on helplessly from around 50 metres away as activists climbed onto the roof, smashed windows, spraypainted its sides and, at one point, threw a smoke bomb inside.

He was particularly infuriated by a statement of support from lecturers at Goldsmiths: "I can imagine what they would say were a group from the TaxPayers' Alliance to turn up at their homes and vandalise them in protest at the way these lecturers are leeching the taxpayer and failing to discipline their students."

Another piece is what happens to a country when it is run by people who view government as a tool of party political warfare, who vandalise the public finances so as to deny the oncoming enemy any advantage.